One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

Immensely intelligible, thought-provoking guide by Nobel prize-winner considers such topics as the distinction between appearance and reality, the existence and nature of matter, idealism, inductive logic, intuitive knowledge, many other subjects. For students and general readers, there is no finer introduction to philosophy than this informative, affordable and highly readable edition that is "concise, free from technical terms, and perfectly clear to the general reader with no prior knowledge of the subject."—The Booklist of the American Library Association.

An examination of leibniz's doctrines of expressive degrees of perception suggest on textual grounds that representations are characterized as more or less 'distinct' or 'confused' in three different senses, Corresponding to the scope of content represent"ed", The degree of awareness accompanying the represent"ing" of that content, And the internal articulation of the idea expressed by such a representation. Following leibniz's rationalistic strategy of explaining representation in terms of inference permits a unified interpretation of these varieties of distinctness of perception and (...) ideas and hence of the phenomena they explain: causal interaction, Sensations and sensory phantasm, And understanding. (shrink)

Introduction In 1709 George Berkeley published his first substantial work, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. As a contribution to the theory of ...

In this highly original account of Bishop George Berkeley's epistemological and metaphysical theories, George S. Pappas seeks to determine precisely what doctrines the philosopher held and what arguments he put forward to support them. Specifically, Pappas overturns accepted opinions about Berkeley's famous attack on the Lockean doctrine of abstract ideas. Berkeley's criticism of these ideas had been thought relevant only to his views on language and to his nominalism; Pappas persuasively argues that Berkeley's ideas about abstraction are crucial to nearly (...) all of the fundamental principles that he defends. Pappas demonstrates how an adequate appreciation of Berkeley's views on abstraction can lead to an improved understanding of his important principle of esse is percipi, and of the arguments Berkeley proposes in support of this principle. Pappas also takes up Berkeley's widely rejected claim to be a philosopher of common sense. He assesses the validity of this self-description and considers why Berkeley might have chosen to align himself with a commonsense position. Pappas shows how three core concepts—abstraction, perception, and common sense—are central to and interdependent in the work of one of the major figures of early modern Western thought. (shrink)

In this article I address the Problem of Universals by answering questions about what facts a solution to the Problem of Universals should explain and how the explanation should go. I argue that a solution to the Problem of Universals explains the facts the Problem of Universals is about by giving the truthmakers (as opposed to the conceptual content and the ontological commitments) of the sentences stating those facts. I argue that the sentences stating the relevant facts are those like (...) 'a has the property F', that is, sentences stating that a particular has a certain property. Finally I show how answering these questions in this way transforms the Problem of Universals, traditionally conceived as the One over Many, that is, the problem of explaining how different particulars can have the same properties, into the Many over One, that is, the problem of explaining how the same particular can have different properties. The Problem of Universals is the problem of the Many over One. (shrink)

A common objection to sense-datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind-independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I point out that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sense-datum theories.

"A wide-ranging study of the 'way of ideas' and its metaphysics, culminating in a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley.".

Logical Atomism is a philosophy that sought to account for the world in all its various aspects by relating it to the structure of the language in which we articulate information. In _The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,_ Bertrand Russell, with input from his young student Ludwig Wittgenstein, developed the concept and argues for a reformed language based on pure logic. Despite Russell’s own future doubts surrounding the concept, this founding and definitive work in analytical philosophy by one of the world’s (...) most significant philosophers is a remarkable attempt to establish a novel way of thinking. (shrink)

THE PHILOSOPHY which I advocate is generally regarded as a species of realism, and accused of inconsistency because of the elements in it which seem contrary to that doctrine. For my part, I do not regard the issue between realists and their opponents as a funda- mental one; I could alter my view on this issue without changing my mind as to any of the doctrines upon which I wish to lay stress. I hold that logic is what is fundamental (...) in philosophy, and that schools should be characterized rather by their logic than by their metaphysic. My own logic is atomic, and it is this aspect upon which I should wish to lay stress. Therefore I prefer to describe my philosophy as "logical atomism," rather than as "realism," whether with or without some prefixed adjective. (shrink)

Feeling out of place because he is the only elephant who sings, Little Elephant sets off a journey to find a home where he belongs.

In this paper, we discern different types of possible relations. We focus on the distinction between internal and external relations and their various possible sub-types. In the first section, we present what is nowadays more or less the standard distinction between internal and external relations. In the second section, we make two contributions to the literature of internal relations: a new taxonomy of internal relations and a novel distinction between formal and material ontological relations. In the third section, we discuss (...) three distinctions among external relations, in particular the distinction between relata-specific and relata-unspecific relations. We argue that relata-specific external relations are a promising but incomplete solution to the vexed problem of Bradley’s relation regress. (shrink)

My paper concerns Berkeley’s notion of theology. After brief considerations on the general attitude toward religion by Berkeley, I try to assess the immaterialistic approach to three main topics of theology: the ground of any theological knowledge, natural theology, revealed theology. My argument takes in consideration particularly Berkeley’s criticism of Scholasticism. My claim is the following: Berkeley holds that all men have an immediate experience of God’s presence, but this experience is not direct conceptual knowledge. I shortly compare my views (...) with D.Berman’s in section two of the paper. The third section deals with the lines of direction of immaterialistic theology. I claim that Berkeley argues for a twofold source of the experience of the divine. The first is natural and regards all human kind. Platonism is the context of Berkeley’s treatment. The second is historical and concerns just Christians. Reference is to the Bible. I treat the problem of the consistency of these two different ways to make an experience of God, comparing my position with that by J.S.Spiegel. Finally I briefly consider Berkeley’s defence of historico-critical reading of the Bible, as a consequence of his attitude towars the second source of theology. (shrink)

My paper moves from Kant's taxonomy for the arguments for the existence of God. After providing a brief survey of Kant's account, I claim that contemporary arguments from design fit Kant's characterization of the physico-theological argument. Then, in the second section, I deal with the logical frame of the argument from design. In the third section I introduce Berkeley's divine language argument (DLA), in order to demonstrate that DLA is an argument from design. Consequently, in the fourth section, I give (...) a refutation of Hooker's and Kline's reading of DLA. Finally, in the last section, I take Berkeley's DLA as a paradigmatic case of the argument from design, showing a fundamental difficulty the argument endorses. (shrink)

La paradoxale expression berkeleyenne « parler aux yeux » ne doit pas seulement être décryptée sur la toile de fond d'une savante psychophysiologie de la vision, mais, plus profondément, il importe aussi de la reconduire à ses sources : la Bible anglicane et maint texte de la tradition hermétique. Le langage optique doit être identifié comme la Parole même de Dieu qui s'adresse à l'humanité par l'intermédiaire de l'organe visuel : un mode de communication et de révélation. Et telle est (...) la détermination décisive de la métaphysique de l'évêque de Cloyne, cette véritable philosophie de l'esprit que certains ont parfois, arbitrairement, taxée de solipsiste. The paradoxical Berkeleyan expression « speaking to the eyes » is not only to be deciphered on the backdrop of a learned psychophysiology of vision, but, also, on a deeper level, it should be brought back to its sources, i. e. the Anglican Bible and a vast array of texts from the Hermetic (Hermaic ?) writings. The optical language must be identified as God's very speech, addressing messages to mankind through the visual organ, i.e. a way to reveal and to communicate. Such is the decisive determination of the metaphysics as delineated by the Bishop of Cloyne, a true philosophy of the mind (spirit ?) which a few people have sometimes quite arbitrarily accused of being solipsistic. (shrink)